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Bridge of Sighs
Bridge of Sighs
Dec 30, 2025 2:08 AM

Author:Richard Russo

Bridge of Sighs

Two boys grow up in Thomaston, upstate New York. One of them gets away to Italy, where he becomes a painter. The other stays to marry Sarah, also an artist; to run a small empire of convenience stores; and to tell their story. He's a good man, but Louis Charles Lynch, known as Lucy, isn't always as reliable as he seems, and even he secretly longs for what he can't have.

Now, at sixty years old, he and Sarah are about to travel to Venice, where Lucy's oldest friend and rival has traded life and family for a life far removed from Thomaston. The truth about why he left, and aboutthe ties that bind these three friends, is complex, heartbreaking and utterly compelling.

Reviews

In graceful, elegiac sentences...Pulitzer Prize-winning Russo exposes the dark heart of the American Dream

—— Daily Mail

Richly evocative and beautifully wrought...a novel of great warmth, charm and intimacy...sharp, funny storytelling

—— New York Times

No novelist working today can better capture the rhythms of small-town life, from its comic idiosyncrasies to its wicked undercurrents of gossip and prejudice

—— Sunday Times

Russo's state-of-the-nation novel is a complex read, but totally engrossing

—— Marie Claire

Beautifully done

—— DJ Taylor , Guardian

Russo excels in this marvellous slice of Americana...Bridge of Sighs is a welcoming place to keep coming back to

—— Herald

Unfolding slowly and in minute detail ... at its best when it evokes the rhythms of blue-collar family life in upstate New York in the 1950s and 60s

—— Metro

James created admirable women characters (often a weak point in a male novelist) and his book explores the old-fashioned but nevertheless sound idea that there are fine souls and absolutely appalling people in a world which is not composed of similar self-seeking anti-heroes and anti-heroines. Evil is always present in James and it appears in this book charming, insidious and poisonous to all the good things in the world. A chilling but compelling book to read in the sun

—— John Mortimer

Fear stalks James's pages like grotesquerie in Dickens, like testosterone in Hemingway, like magic in Angela Carter

—— Independent on Sunday

Wodehouse is so utterly, properly, simply funny

—— Adele Parks

I've recorded all the Jeeves books, and I can tell you this: it's like singing Mozart. The perfection of the phrasing is a physical pleasure. I doubt if any writer in the English language has more perfect music

—— Simon Callow

Wodehouse was quite simply the Bee's Knees. And then some

—— Joseph Connolly

I constantly find myself drooling with admiration at the sublime way Wodehouse plays with the English language

—— Simon Brett

Quite simply, the master of comic writing at work

—— Jane Moore

To pick up a Wodehouse novel is to find oneself in the presence of genius - no writer has ever given me so much pure enjoyment

—— John Julius Norwich

Compulsory reading for anyone who has a pig, an aunt - or a sense of humour!

—— Lindsey Davis

The Wodehouse wit should be registered at Police HQ as a chemical weapon

—— Kathy Lette

Witty and effortlessly fluid. His books are laugh-out-loud funny

—— Arabella Weir

The funniest writer ever to put words to paper

—— Hugh Laurie

The greatest comic writer ever

—— Douglas Adams

P.G. Wodehouse wrote the best English comic novels of the century

—— Sebastian Faulks

Sublime comic genius

—— Ben Elton

He exhausts superlatives

—— Stephen Fry

The Everyman edition promises to be a splendid celebration of the divine Plum

—— The Independent

The handsome bindings are only the cherry on top of what is already a cake without compare

—— Evening Standard

You don't analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour

—— Stephen Fry
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